Content Overview
I have been teaching for 13+ years in higher education both in English and in Women's and Gender Studies. Teaching is my passion, and I have been lucky to have many different kinds of teaching experiences over the years and to work with many talented students.
On this part of the site you can find:
For a more comprehensive look at my teaching experiences, check out the study abroad link, as well as my CV. |
Areas of Teaching Expertise & Teaching Experience
Areas of Teaching Expertise
Supervised Research
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Courses Taught: Undergraduate Level
Courses Taught: Graduate Level
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My teaching philosophy
My teaching philosophy has evolved greatly over the course of 13+ years of teaching in higher education, first as a Master's student, later as a PhD candidate, and most recently as an assistant professor. In all my classes, the commonalities are student-led learning and exploration, inclusivity and intersectionality, as well as an ethics of care and kindness that can help all students succeed. I also emphasize real-world applications of what we learn in class and how to transfer skills from the classroom to today's workforce.
In tandem with these goals, I work to help students see beyond their most recent horizon; to find new topics that energize them; to deepen their knowledge of themselves and the world around them; to engage thoughtfully with social justice issues, and to make critical connections that will help them adapt to a rapidly-changing world. In order to achieve these outcomes, I focus on helping students find their voice through a variety of classroom activities. Group work, individual writing, and partner discussions form the core of class time in my "flipped" classroom. Below is a selection of courses I have taught with detailed course descriptions and links to the syllabi. |
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Freshman Composition
First year writing. Freshman composition. College writing 101. Whatever you call it, we all know that college freshmen need a class that will introduce them to the basics of writing in a university environment. In addition to creating a scaffolded series of assignments that introduce students to the writing process, I carefully curate readings that will introduce students to different kinds of argumentation. I often juxtapose texts from different time periods in order to elicit conversation and help students identify elements of argumentation in different kinds of writing. Most recently, I juxtaposed a short selection from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Sojourner Truth's speech "Ain't I a Woman." Social justice is a crucial component of my freshman composition courses, setting students on a path to consider ethical issues in our world today.
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Sophomore Literature Surveys: World Lit, American Lit, British Lit
I have taught surveys of British, American, and World literature to both English majors and non-majors throughout my teaching career. I enjoy teaching courses that provide an overview of literary works, as this is my chance to introduce students to texts that form the cultural references anchoring modern rhetorics. Whether it's the realm of politics, stand-up comedy, literary fiction, or cartoons, knowledge of texts like The Odyssey, Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe form an undercurrent of collective knowledge that many of our students are encountering for the first time at university. This makes sophomore level survey courses a dynamic place of exploration with unexpected challenges and rewards.
Whether we are talking about Marie de France's Lanval or Dante's Inferno, students naturally want to make connections to our current cultural moment, and I encourage them to find these echoes and synergies. When students see the value inherent in reading texts from the near and distant past, they become stronger critical thinkers. Similarly, the diversity of today's student body means that choosing texts for surveys is a critical task for myself as instructor. I focus on curating a syllabus that will represent as many diverse voices as possible in terms of gender, class, race, and, in the case of world literature, of nationality as well. |
Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Literature
I have taught course in my time period of specialization in many different ways over the years, both as an upper-level survey and as a themed course in gender and sexuality in the long eighteenth century. In 2012 I taught this course as a survey of women poets, and I used my experiences to write an article about student-led teaching published online at Digital Defoe.
When I taught this as an upper-level survey in 2016, I had students create websites through Weebly where they had to post to a blog in response to the texts we read. They also each created a "pin board" where they documented a trend, idea, or piece of material culture from the eighteenth century in each text we read about in a visual medium. This kind of multimodal writing helped students analyze the texts we read while cultivating the skills needed for writing in an electronic medium. You can access the student pages through the homepage that I made as a model for the class. Topics that students covered included: money in the eighteenth century; fashion and hair styles; love and courtship; war and the military; social status; medicine and illness; and marriage and divorce. In this way, students learned to read texts with an eye to patterns in literary works, connections across time and texts, and the larger ideas of the Enlightenment. |
Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
I have been teaching introductory classes in women's, gender, and sexuality studies since my time as a graduate student at Stony Brook University. At Texas A&M International University, I revived a defunct minor in Women's and Gender Studies and piloted the first new introduction to women's and gender studies course at the university. (I discuss the minor on a podcast too!) The course covered a range of topics: women's rights history; gender binaries; sexual orientation; LGBTQ rights; representations of women's bodies; women in the media; intersectionality; women's creativity, etc.
In tandem with the minor, I organized events (like the one on the #metoo movement being advertised in this poster) for students to attend that would help supplement instruction, to make it clear that the mission of women's and gender studies is both a discipline of study and a call to action and activism. I have also taught many upper-level women's studies and gender studies classes, as well as gender studies courses at the graduate level. |